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The Invercargill Airport control tower.

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1984 Floods

Flood of memories People felt pressured Your say: The 1984 floods If it's this bad now, what's still to come? Watching as your life washes away 'A town devastated' Never a Day Like It, and lived through Getting back to order after the floods All flights cancelled How prepared are you?

For a while there, Invercargill reeked.

The city's airport was hugely inundated. Aircraft weren't getting high, but something surely was.

After two weeks into a six-week pumping job, the stagnant water at the airport became anaerobic.

"And (it) stank like crazy, resembling sewage ponds," Ministry of Works and Development project engineer and civil defence representative David Boniface recalls.

"Many showers and changes of clothes became a necessity for maintenance staff."

De-watering the airport was always going to be a huge task. The flooding had been worsened by the city council pumps at "Lake Hawkins" being flooded out of use. The loss of electric power didn't help.

An SOS went out for high-capacity, low-head submersible pumps that could be powered by standalone generators.

"We had a wonderful response ... within 24 hours we had at least 12 high-capacity Flyght submersible pump sets with generators in Invercargill, with pumping capacity in excess of 5000 litres a second.

Within 48 hours, three primary pumping stations were set up one at Lake Hawkins, pumping over the Stead St seawall into the estuary, and two pumping into the Waihopai from the Stead St bridge and from near the borstal bridge.

The pumps were manned around the clock, and there as in so many places the arrival of Salvation Army supplies of hot drinks, soup and food were welcome.

It may have been summer, but many days were wet and cold.

At the time, Mr Boniface did some calculations abut how long it would take to de-water the airport and came up with 40 days.

They did it in 38.

"Perhaps," he says, "I forgot to allow for some natural seepage and condensation."

Looking back, what comes through for Mr Boniface was the value of the Ministry of Works and its resources in civil defence emergencies.

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